British GT3 driver Ollie Millroy needed five broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken hand, and a bruised lung treated in a Shanghai hospital after his Ferrari 296 GT3 caught fire during a China GT Championship race on Sept. 5 — and he says he is only alive because a rival driver stopped his own car mid-race to pull him out, according to Gulf News and NBC News.

Key Points

• Millroy’s Ferrari was struck by another car roughly 20 minutes into the race at Shanghai International Circuit and burst into flames, according to IBTimes UK.
• Dutch driver Loek Hartog, 23, was still racing when he saw the fireball, pulled his own car over, and ran back to help — reaching Millroy’s car before track marshals did.
• Hartog grabbed a fire extinguisher from an approaching marshal, put the flames out himself, then pulled Millroy free from the passenger side after the driver’s door jammed, per IBTimes UK.
• No safety marshals had reached the burning car when Hartog arrived, the same report states.
• Millroy’s team, FIST Team AAI, has since said it will withdraw from future China GT rounds over how long the car burned before help arrived.

The race went red-flagged immediately and did not resume. Millroy, 36, spent close to an hour unconscious and required surgery in China before he could be discharged. He posted his own account on Instagram once he was well enough, writing that he was alive that evening “entirely thanks to one man” and that he would remember Hartog’s “incredible act of bravery” for the rest of his life, according to NBC News‘s coverage of the post.

What the Rescuer Said

Hartog answered Millroy directly in the comments of that same Instagram post rather than through any interview. “You have nothing to thank me for,” he wrote, adding that he wished “to live in a world where this would not have been considered as bravery but instinct,” per IBTimes UK. He gave up whatever result he was running toward that lap the moment he stopped the car — a decision no scoring sheet will ever reflect.

Fallout for China GT

FIST Team AAI’s complaint centers on response time: extinguishing equipment and trained marshals are supposed to reach a burning GT3 car within seconds, not after a rival driver has already done the job himself. Series organizers have acknowledged shortcomings in their emergency protocol and opened an investigation, according to IBTimes UK. Whatever the review finds, the footage already answers the more basic question GT3 racing depends on — what a driver does when the checkered flag stops mattering and the person next to him is on fire.